Reviews: Shaw, Bob

Orbitsville —
Bob Shaw
Orbitsville, book 1

1975’s
Orbitsville
is
the first volume in Bob Shaw’s Orbitsville trilogy.

Vance
Garamond is a competent starship pilot but a terrible babysitter. He
fails to prevent his boss’s son from falling to his death. His
boss, Elizabeth Lindstrom, the autocratic president of the company
that controls interstellar flight, is notoriously vindictive. Rather
than wait to see what form her vengeance will take, Garamond collects
his wife Aileen and son Christopher and flees to the stars in a
commandeered flickerwing starship, the Bissendorf.

If
only there were somewhere beyond Lindstrom’s reach Garamond and his
family could flee …

The Palace of Eternity —
Bob Shaw

Bob
Shaw’s 1969 novel
The Palace
of Eternity
is almost a mirror image of this week’s Tanith Lee:
it starts off looking like the hardest of hard SF, then heads off
into territory more often associated with fantasy.

Sickened
by his experiences in the great war between humanity and the alien
Pythsyccans, retired soldier Mack Travener settles on the planet
Mnemosyne. Conventional interstellar craft cannot approach the
planet, which is surrounded by a shell of fragments left by two
shattered moons. Mnemosyne seems doomed to remain an eternal
backwater. Inexplicably, despite its rustic nature, the planet is a
hotbed of creativity, particularly artistic creativity.

Mack’s
attempt to reinvent himself as a civilian mechanic on a planet of
peaceful artists is short-lived.

Vertigo —
Bob Shaw

1979’s
Vertigo
is not my first Bob Shaw novel. That would be Who
Goes Here.

It’s
also not my favourite Bob Shaw novel. That would be
The Palace
of Eternity.

It is, however, the only Bob Shaw novel set in Canada1.

Well,
Alberta.
But
as an Ontarian I regard all of the lesser provinces with equal
favour. At least they aren’t
Manitoba!
Well, except for poor Manitoba.

Today’s
venerables mourn the bustling Moon bases and omnipresent jet packs
promised by the futurists and SF writers of ages past. Air Patrolman
Rob Hasson’s twenty first century may not have moon bases
2, but it
definitely has the counter-gravity harness, that marvelous device
that gave the freedom of the skies to millions.